Herald Blogs

Hey, remember all those stories about how American TV viewers were finally read to embrace telenovelas? April Fool! They hated a daily schedule of novelas, so much so that MyNetworkTV has officially abandoned them. The net's new schedule for the fall doesn't include a single one. Instead, it's got some off-brand sports (martial arts and beach volleyball), two nights of theatrical movies and lots and lots and lots of reality shows.

The latter include programs about mean police instructors (The Academy), mean inmates (Jail), mean couples (Divorce Wars) and mean in-laws (Meet The Folks). And for a mid-season replacement, there's one about mean newspaper editors. (Prospective titles include Death To All Adjectives and I Don't Care If You Have Leukemia, Finish Your Story.) OK, I made up the part about the editors, but everything else is true, as you'll see in September.

The TV news move to co-opt You Tube continues. News To Me, the CNN Headline News show built around viewers' videos, debuted earlier this month. Next up: i-Caught, which kicks off a six-episode trial run on ABC Aug. 6. Like News To Me, it will have an associated website where viewers can submit their videos for consideration.

Another similarity to News To Me: The video will be edited and packaged by ABC producers and reporters, who will flesh it out into real stories with depth, continuity and background. I'm sure the mainstream-media-is-a-fascist-monopoly crowd will sneer that this defeats the whole point of user-generated content. But if you've watched News To Me, you know what a dreadful mistake that would be. The debut episode featured the story of a passenger who had to be rescued from a sinking cruise ship. His video consisted mostly of shots of people's feet, the soundtrack an differentiated garble of voices. Without CNN's reworking (which included an interview with the passenger himself, explaining when the video was shot and what it showed) it would have been unwatchable, as anybody who's ever been subjected to an evening of a friend's home movies well knows.

User-generated content is the latest big media fad, not just on television but at newspapers too. (The Miami Herald is dabbling in it, too, our management just having moved on from Hula-Hoops and Pet Rocks.) Putting the experiences of readers and/or viewers has always been part of journalism -- what is a news story but a collection of eyewitness accounts from people who are themselves news consumers? -- and the ubiquity of cell phone cameras and digital recorders has made that especially useful to television. But in the end, use-generated content is likely to remain a sideshow, a complement to the work of journalists rather than a replacement for it. When people go out to a restaurant, they don't want to cook their own dinners, or eat something whipped up by a random guy at the next table. They want food skillfully prepared by a professional chef, with training and experience. Ultimately, newspaper readers and television viewers won't settle for anything less when it comes to news, all the sloganeering from media-bashers to the contrary.

NBC, mired in fourth place among the broadcast networks and coming off one of the worst ratings sweeps in its entire history, has applied the typical solution: tossing the programming chief off a cliff. It's hard to tell whether he was officially fired or just quit when another executive was brought in over him, but either way Kevin Reilly left NBC Tuesday.

Reilly joined NBC three years ago from FX, where he helped shepherd The Shield and Nip/Tuck onto the air. NBC must have looked like a dream job at the time -- it was at the top of the ratings heap -- but it turned out to be the corporate version of a mansion that's been eaten away from the inside by termites. Friends, the linchpin of the Thursday schedule, was about to retire and other heavy hitters like Frasier and ER had passed their prime. At the same time, NBC was about to unveil a dramatic cost-cutting regime. The Hollywood trade press today is bristling with stories that Reilly could only order up about half as many pilots of prospective new shows each season as the other big broadcast networks.

Despite all that, Reilly's tenure at NBC produced a number of intelligent programs, including Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, Kidnapped,My Name Is Earl, 30 Rock, Heroes, and Friday Night Lights. But the network had trouble attracting audiences for them. Most of those shows are a lot more popular with critics than with viewers. Whether that's the fault of the programming boss or network marketers is a matter best left to students of corporate organization, but it's interesting that Reilly is already being mentioned as a candidate for a top slot at HBO, which is trying to figure out how to replace The Sopranos, Sex And The City and Deadwood. Sounds to me like people in the TV business have the same impression of Reilly that I do -- that he's a smart guy who develops smart shows.

Meanwhile, he's being replaced at NBC by a two-man team: Ben Silverman, head of a production company called Reveille, and Marc Graboff, an NBC veteran. Graboff's expertise is mainly on the business side, while Silverman's company has specialized in cannibalizing foreign shows and regurgitating them as American products -- most notably, The Office and Ugly Betty. He may turn out to be a programming genius, but I keep thinking of a quote from him in the New York Times last year bragging about how many of his company's pilots had been picked up by the networks: "We have the best pilot-to-series ratio in television history. It's spin, I know, but I'm all about pushing Ben right now." Yeah, that's a guy I'd like to work for.

American reality shows are for cream puffs. For the really tough stuff, you've got to go to the Netherlands, where The Big Donor Show debuts Friday. Contestants on that one win a a new kidney. Really -- the host is a terminally ill 37-year-old woman named Lisa, who's giving away one of her kidneys to the winner. Is this a stroke of marketing genius, or what? If the show is a hit, she's still got another kidney, a liver, a heart and two lungs to distribute, not to mention all kinds of eyeballs and spleens and other less glamorous organs that can be distributed to second-place winners. Personally, I'd start watching American Idol again if Jordin Sparks had walked away with Paula Abdul's liver.

No doubt Tony and the guys went to fly a flag over Lucky Luciano's grave in honor of his work policing the New York waterfront against Axis spies in World War II. They'll be back next week. Meanwhile, while chatting last week with Steve van Zandt, the former E Street Band guitarist who plays family consigliore Silvio, I asked who was the Frankie Valli nut on the show. Not only has The Sopranos featured a lot of 4 Seasons tunes over the years, but Valli himself was a regular on the show for a couple of seasons before winding up No. 1 with a bullet, literally.

The question seemed daft to van Zandt. "The 4 Seasons were an extraordinarily important part of growing up in New Jersey,'' he said, "particularly if you were Italian. Frankie Valli was the Frank Sinatra of our generation, the classy guy coming out of doo wop. And the records were so polished: Walk Like A Man, Rag Doll, those were beautifully produced. The 4 Seasons sort of reflect The Sopranos sensibility. And now the success of Jersey Boys has been a validation of that to the whole nation." To which I hastily agreed, because everybody on The Sopranos takes aesthetic judgments very seriously, as Christopher Moltisanti certainly learned a couple of weeks ago.

John Wayne marathon (12:15 a.m. Sunday, Encore Westerns) -- The most sacred tradition of Memorial Day -- that is, lying around all weekend like a slug watching various programming marathons until your eyeballs melt -- kicked off just after midnight this morning with the 1934 cowboy flick Randy Rides Alone. That began an orgy of John Wayne films that doesn't end until Wednesday at 2:20 a.m. when the documentary 100 Years Of John Wayne flickers across the screen. Along the way you can see everything from 1956's The Searchers to 1973's Cahill U.S. Marshal -- the latter seven times, just in case you wanted to memorize the script.

Jaws marathon (5 a.m. Monday, Starz) -- Remember the episode of Friends where Monica thought Chandler was addicted to "shark porn''? (If not, you really shouldn't be reading this blog.) Well, he would have had to break out the Viagra for this: Jaws, Jaws 2,Jaws III and Jaws: The Revenge airing three times apiece in 23 hours.

TV roadtrip marathon (6 a.m. Monday, TV Land) -- Episodes of I Love Lucy, The Munsters, Leave It To Beaver, Bonanza, The Andy Griffith Show, Green Acres and Sanford & Son in which the characters hit the road. See Ethel and Lucy visit Albuquerque! See Grandpa Munster turn into a wolf! See Arnold the Pig -- the four-legged Green Acres one, not the governor of California -- win a Hollywood contract! For those who prefer the more profound intellect of the cinema, the marathon wraps up at 6 p.m. with a screening of National Lampoon's Vacation.

M*A*S*H* marathon (8 a.m. Monday, Hallmark Channel) -- An annual event, Hallmark's M*A*S*H* Bash this year focuses on Cpl. Klinger, the hospital orderly who was perpetually trying to win a discharge from the Army in the pre-don't-ask-don't-tell era by dressing in drag. It's episodes over 12 hours, and you have to bring your own lingerie.

At 9 tonight WE airs an episode of America's Cutest Puppies that was shot in Miami. Sorry I'm having to keep this item so short, but I have to get off the computer before my cat Panchito reads this and flies into a rage. His idea of a good show about dogs is is the last five minutes of Old Yeller.

Rosie O'Donnell has quit The View, just two days after yet another one of her nasty little spats with co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck over the Iraq war. Well, not so little; it lasted about 10 minutes of air time. It started when Hasselbeck challenged O'Donnell to clarify what she meant during a show last week when she said: "655,000 Iraqi civilians have died. Who are the terrorists?" O'Donnell retorted that Hasselbeck was "cowardly" and it went downhill from there as the other two co-hosts hid barricaded themselves behind sofas.

Not, let us be perfectly clear, that anybody was really mad. Those red faces and quivering lips were apparently the result of bad camera work. "I'm extremely grateful,'' O'Donnell said in a statement released by ABC. "It's been an amazing year and I love all three women." Just not enough to set foot on the same stage with them.

If you're still brokenhearted by ABC's ruthless cancellation of the William Shatner game show Show Me The Money, redemption is at hand. GSN -- as the Game Show Network is known these days -- is airing the whole series, including the near-mythic two lost episodes -- starting June 12.